XFree86 10 Years Old

ChazeFroy writes "XFree86 is now 10 years old. To quote from the page, 'What makes this particularly eventful is that it is fully backwards compatible; this is a true testament to the spirit of the original X protocol of which XFree86 is its finest implementation.'" Ten years and still binary compatible. Very cool.

Comments

Re:Seems a bit... odd

[Baki]

It is not really binary compatible, but protocol compatible. X11 is a (network) PROTOCOL that describes how to send drawing instructions from client to server and how the server should send events (mouse, key) back to the client.

And exactly that is the genius of X (in contrast with most other windowing systems that are based on API's). Therefore, it is easy to get network transparency, and backwards compatability does not confront you with the headaches that API binary compatability causes.

Maintaining compatability is just as simple (OK a bit less since it is a complex protocol, but the extention mechanism was very clever) as backwards compatability for ftp,nntp,dns etc.

Re:X kicks ass, XFree86 doubly so.

[psamuels]

Linux needs to consider running X on top of the desktop rather than underneath it. Implement versions of GTK/QT that talk to the framebuffer directly and run KDE/GNOME on top of that. I bet the performance increase would be astounding.

So, you run Gtk+ right on the bare metal. Well, that's fine as long as you don't mind running full-screen. If you want to have more than one application running at once, someone has to arbitrate. That means you need a window manager. Then someone has to keep track of the mouse pointer - individual applications would otherwise fight over it. That includes drawing it, moving it around, changing it to the right sizes, shapes and colors on demand. I guess that would go into the window manager as well. Same goes for keyboard focus - applications can't all think they have the keyboard at the same time, now, can they? What the hey, throw that into the window manager too.

Cut 'n' paste between applications? Need some sort of message passing server. Throw that into the window manager as well, why don't we. Drag 'n' drop? More messages - have to support that in the new window manager. Session management (i.e. login, logout, and which applications to start up when you re-log-in)? Need something for that too. 3D calls to the graphics card? Someone had better arbitrate - you only want one application doing that sort of thing at a time. I guess the kernel could probably handle that, since it is already arbitrating the frame buffer.

By now you have a new "window manager" which has subsumed a lot of the complexity of the X server. Sure, you are no longer passing messages between two processes just to display 2D graphics, but I'm not really sure how much of a speedup you get just from that. As Jim Gettys (you're posting technical comments about X11, so I hope you know that name!) is fond of pointing out, lots of people think X is old, clunky and bloated, but nobody seems to be able to produce an alternative windowing system with equivalent (or even adequate) feature set but without comparable complexity.